Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations

Fifteen is the number of people with whom we can have deep trust in the face of almost any turn of events. Dunbar calls these “sympathy groups.

Effective leaders, in their own way, achieve three tasks at team launch: •      Clarify and give meaning to the team’s task •      Bound the team as one performing unit •      Establish norms of conduct

the pace of technological change is so fast that if you can latch on to it and hang on, it will accelerate you past all traditional competition.

if you team up top-talented people—even if you give them the wrong jobs—they will figure out a way to do a good job.

Research confirms that teams with transactive memory perform better than their counterparts who lack it because the group’s members efficiently identify and use relevant knowledge and generate higher-quality solutions.

leader attribution error. It is the inclination to assign to the leader credit or blame for the team’s success or failure.

Never forget that all successful enterprises, no matter how big and wealthy, are an aggregation of teams—large and small, loyal and renegade, stabilizing and anarchistic, from the lowliest engineers to executive row—all of them working, sometimes in harmony and sometimes at cross-purposes, toward the success of the company.

Research on radical-innovation teams shows that adding some conformity to a team may actually drive creativity.

Cognitive fitness” is a state of optimized ability to reason, remember, learn, plan, and adapt that is enhanced by certain attitudes, lifestyle choices, and exercises.

we are the “gating factor” that keeps a process from running faster. It is people, not scale or technology, who determine how well an organization adapts to change.

transactive memory is used by teams to benefit from a collective awareness of who knows what and therefore to both direct incoming knowledge to the appropriate group members and to retrieve vital information from within the group.7